Alice‘s Visual Challenge: Make You Believe ‘World of Insanity’

HOLLYWOOD — Not unlike the March Hare, visual effects guru Ken Ralston hurled everything but the kitchen sink at Alice in Wonderland to conjure a big-screen version of Lewis Carroll’s magical mystery world.

“The whole movie is based on the fact that we’ve got to make you believe this world of insanity,” the four-time Oscar winner says. “Therefore the audience needs to believe Alice’s interactions with the animated characters, the actors, the characters we shot a month after we filmed Alice that we had to blend in later — plus the environment she wanders around in.”

To achieve the required results, Ralston and his team applied a massive injection of CGI to an assortment of Nerf balls, stilts, rubber rabbits, trick bow ties, cardboard frogs and green-leotarded thespians. After setting up shop at Sony Pictures Imageworks across the street from a green-screen soundstage in Los Angeles’ Culver City neighborhood, Ralston spent 22 months with director Tim Burton packaging seven weeks of human performance into a 3-D fantasy land.

Decompressing in a Los Angeles hotel room after a seven-days-a-week race to the finish line, Ralston illustrated his Wonderland approach by deconstructing the tea-party sequence in which Alice (played by Mia Wasikowska) meets the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and assorted talking critters.

“On the set we had the actual table and the chairs,” Ralston said. “Johnny’s in full makeup. The Cheshire Cat is there, the March Hare is there, the Dormouse are all there as … nothing. We had voice talent wearing green, and we placed them in the exact spot we wanted the characters’ voices to be coming from. During rehearsal, we had a rubber version of March Hare sitting in a chair along with full-scale maquettes of the Cheshire Cat and the other creatures in order to give the actors an idea of the eye lines. Then we’d pull them out and shoot the scene.”

Crispin Glover’s Knave of Hearts character disrupts the tea party by making a grand entrance on a handsome steed. Ralston laughs as he recalls the actual shoot.

“What you’ve really got is Crispin in a green suit, because all we’re using is his head,” Ralston said. “He’s sitting on a green barrel these stunt guys are awkwardly holding up. We took that and changed it into the horse.”

That kind of digital shape-shifting has become second nature for Ralston. A founding member of Industrial Light and Magic, Ralston worked with George Lucas on Star Wars and later pioneered motion-capture technologies for The Polar Express and Beowulf.

Cast members in the PG-rated Alice in Wonderland, which opens Friday, were initially rigged up with motion-capture sensors. But, Ralston says, “as the film progressed, we threw out all the motion-capture stuff. For one thing, it was boring.”

Wonderland‘s most striking character effect comes in the form of Helena Bonham Carter’s outsize performance as the swell-headed Red Queen. Ralston essentially cut-and-pasted a large version of Carter’s head on top of her body by filming the actress’ face with a separate camera.

“To blow the Red Queen’s head up larger than normal size, we needed more pixels to get the same-quality resolution,” Ralston said. “We used a 4K Dalsa camera to separately shoot Helena’s head in every scene. That gave us a much bigger negative to work with.”

Then, during post-production, composite artistry tapered the character’s neck and “hour-glassed” the waist.

“What you see on screen is all Helena,” Ralston said. “Putting those shots together was not the least bit simple. We could have started switching her out with CG things, but that wasn’t the point. We want the real performance in there.”